Fracture Detection In X-rays Using Custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) And Transfer Learning Models
This addresses fracture diagnosis in low-resource settings where expert radiology is limited, but it is incremental as it applies existing CNN methods to a specific medical imaging task.
The paper tackled automated fracture detection in X-ray images by developing a custom CNN, achieving 95.96% accuracy and an F1-score of 0.91 on the FracAtlas dataset, while transfer learning models performed poorly.
Bone fractures present a major global health challenge, often resulting in pain, reduced mobility, and productivity loss, particularly in low-resource settings where access to expert radiology services is limited. Conventional imaging methods suffer from high costs, radiation exposure, and dependency on specialized interpretation. To address this, we developed an AI-based solution for automated fracture detection from X-ray images using a custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and benchmarked it against transfer learning models including EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, and ResNet50. Training was conducted on the publicly available FracAtlas dataset, comprising 4,083 anonymized musculoskeletal radiographs. The custom CNN achieved 95.96% accuracy, 0.94 precision, 0.88 recall, and an F1-score of 0.91 on the FracAtlas dataset. Although transfer learning models (EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, ResNet50) performed poorly in this specific setup, these results should be interpreted in light of class imbalance and data set limitations. This work highlights the promise of lightweight CNNs for detecting fractures in X-rays and underscores the importance of fair benchmarking, diverse datasets, and external validation for clinical translation